Chapter 2: The Foster Home Secret
The police had sealed off the house, interviewing Ryan’s foster mom, Lisa, while Mia and Jake loaded Eli into the ambulance. Eli had woken up halfway to the hospital, his eyes wide with confusion, and he couldn’t remember anything about the collapse. “I was just playing with my dinosaur,” he said, rubbing his head. “Then everything went black.”
Mia drove to the hospital, her mind racing. She’d been a paramedic long enough to know that sudden collapses in young kids were rare, but two identical cases in the same foster boy? That was impossible, unless Ryan was causing them on purpose. She pulled out her phone, searching for the police report from the Colorado Springs incident, and she found it: a 16-year-old foster boy named Ryan Hale, who’d caused three separate sudden collapses in his foster siblings over the course of six months, before vanishing without a trace. The report said that Ryan had a history of behavioral issues, but no one had ever been able to prove that he was causing the collapses on purpose.
She pulled into the hospital parking lot, helping Eli and Lisa inside, and she stayed by their side until Eli was admitted for observation. Lisa sat in the waiting room, staring at the wall, and she finally broke down and told Mia everything she knew about Ryan.
“He showed up at our door three months ago,” she said, her voice trembling. “The social worker said he’d been bounced between 12 foster homes in two years, and that he was a ‘hard case.’ But he was so quiet, so polite. He never argued, never broke anything, just sat in his room and drew pictures of dinosaurs. Then, two weeks ago, his foster sister, Lila, fell down the stairs, and she broke her arm. The social worker said it was an accident, but Ryan was standing right there, and he had that same smile on his face. I didn’t want to believe it, but now...”
She trailed off, wiping tears from her eyes. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to hurt him, but I also don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”
Mia put a hand on her shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “Ryan’s a master at hiding what he’s really like. But we’re going to find out why he’s doing this. We’re going to stop him.”
She left the hospital, driving back to the house, where the police had finished their initial search. They hadn’t found Ryan, but they’d found a stack of drawings in his room, all of them of kids lying on the floor, their eyes closed. One of them had a note scrawled on the back: “Another one bites the dust.”
Mia pulled out her phone, calling her old partner from the Colorado Springs department, Sergeant Tom Bennett. “I need your help with a case,” she said, when he answered. “I just found a foster boy named Ryan Hale, the same kid who vanished after causing three collapses in his foster siblings two months ago. He’s in a foster home in Denver, and he just caused another collapse with a six-year-old boy.”
Tom’s voice was tight with surprise. “We’ve been looking for him for months,” he said. “The social worker who was assigned to him was fired for covering up his behavior, and we never found any hard evidence to arrest him. But if he’s causing collapses on purpose, that’s attempted murder. We’ll send a team over right away.”
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Mia hung up, sitting down on the porch of the house, and she thought about Ryan’s face, the way he’d smiled as Eli collapsed, the way he’d run away when she’d recognized him. She knew that he was dangerous, that he’d hurt more kids if they didn’t catch him soon. She also knew that there was something more to his story, something that no one had ever figured out. Why would a 10-year-old boy hurt other kids? What was driving him to do it?
She pulled out her notebook, writing down every detail she could remember about Ryan, every detail from the Colorado Springs case, and she knew that she was going to solve this case, no matter what it took.
